Embattled Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer hit with lawsuit that she illegally purged male employees

[davidn3600]

A prominent local media executive fired from Yahoo last year has filed a lawsuit accusing CEO Marissa Mayer of leading a campaign to purge male employees.

“Mayer encouraged and fostered the use of (an employee performance-rating system) to accommodate management’s subjective biases and personal opinions, to the detriment of Yahoo’s male employees,” said the suit by Scott Ard filed this week in federal district court in San Jose.

Ard, who worked for Yahoo for three-and-a-half years until January 2015, is now editor in chief of the Silicon Valley Business Journal. His lawsuit also claims that Yahoo illegally fired large numbers of workers ousted under a performance-rating system imposed by Mayer. That allegation was not tied to gender.

Yahoo spokeswoman Carolyn Clark said Yahoo couldn’t comment on pending litigation, but she defended the firm’s performance-review process, which she said was guided by “fairness.”

“Our performance review process was developed to allow employees at all levels of the company to receive meaningful, regular, and actionable feedback from others,” Clark said. “We believe this process allows our team to develop and do their best work. Our performance review process also allows for high performers to engage in increasingly larger opportunities at our company, as well as for low performers to be transitioned out.”

In addition to Mayer, two other female executives, former vice-president of news Megan Liberman and former chief marketing officer Kathy Savitt, are accused in the lawsuit of discriminating on the basis of gender.

“When Savitt began at Yahoo the top managers reporting to her … including the chief editors of the verticals and magazines were less than 20 percent female. Within a year and a half those top managers were more than 80 percent female,” the lawsuit said. “Savitt has publicly expressed support for increasing the number of women in media and has intentionally hired and promoted women because of their gender, while terminating, demoting or laying off male employees because of their gender.

“Of the approximately 16 senior-level editorial employees hired or promoted by Savitt … in approximately an 18-month period, 14 of them, or 87 percent, were female.” the lawsuit said.

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Ard’s suit also takes aim at the performance-review process he said Mayer imposed. The process allowed high-level managers to arbitrarily change scores of employees they had no contact with, and it “permitted and encouraged discrimination based on gender or any other personal bias held by management.”

http://www.siliconvalley.com/2016/10/06/yahoo-ceo-marissa-mayer-led-illegal-purge-of-male-employees-lawsuit-charges/


The company is being slammed with one controversy after another.

In recent days and weeks the company has come under fire by internet and privacy advocates for allowing the US government to secretly scan the emails of millions of its users.
Also last month, Yahoo admitted that hackers broke into their systems and potentially up to 500 million email account passwords may have been compromised. Yahoo failed to disclose the hack to its users.

[Egnever]

1. That Verizon buyout is getting cheaper every day.